ritual, the performance of ceremonial acts prescribed by tradition or by sacerdotal decree. Ritual is a specific, observable mode of behaviour exhibited by all known societies. It is thus possible to view ritual as a way of defining or describing humans.

Nature and significance

Human beings are sometimes described or defined as a basically rational, economic, political, or playing species. They may, however, also be viewed as ritual beings, who exhibit a striking parallel between their ritual and verbal behaviour. Just as language is a system of symbols that is based upon arbitrary rules, ritual may be viewed as a system of symbolic acts that is based upon arbitrary rules.

The intricate, yet complex, relation between ritual and language can be seen in the history of various attempts to explain ritual behaviour. In most explanations, language becomes a necessary factor in the theory concerning the nature of ritual, and the specific form of language that is tied to explanations of ritual is the language of myth. Both myth and ritual remain fundamental to any analysis of religions.

Three general approaches to a theory about the nature and origin of ritual prevail.

The origin approach

The earliest approach was an attempt to explain ritual, as well as religion, by means of a theory concerned with historical origin. In most cases, this theory also assumed an evolutionary hypothesis that would explain the development of ritual behaviour through history. The basic premise, or law, for this approach is that ontogeny (development of an individual organism) recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a related group of organisms), just as the human embryo recapitulates the stages of human evolutionary history in the womb—e.g., the gill stage. The solution to explaining the apparently universal scope of ritual depended upon the success in locating the oldest cultures and cults. Scholars believed that if they could discover this origin, they would be able to explain the contemporary rituals of man.

There are almost as many solutions as authors in this approach. In the search for an origin of ritual, research turned from the well-known literate cultures to those that appeared to be less complex and preliterate. The use of the terms primitive religion and primitive cultures comes from this approach in seeking an answer to the meaning of ritual, myth, and religion. Various cultures and rituals were singled out, sacrifice of either men or animals becoming one of the main topics for speculation, though the exact motivation or cause of sacrificial ritual was disputed among the leading authors of the theory. For W. Robertson Smith, a British biblical scholar who first published his theory in the ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–89), sacrifice was motivated by the desire for communion between members of a primitive group and their god. The origin of ritual, therefore, was believed to be found in totemic (animal symbolic clan) cults; and totemism, for many authors, was thus believed to be the earliest stage of religion and ritual. The various stages of ritual development and evolution, however, were never agreed upon. Given this origin hypothesis, rituals of purification, gift giving, piacular (expiatory) rites, and worship were viewed as developments, or secondary stages, of the original sacrificial ritual. The Christian Eucharist (Holy Communion), along with contemporary banquets and table etiquette, were explained as late developments or traits that had their origin and meaning in the totemic sacrifice.

The influence of Robertson Smith’s theory on the origin of ritual can be seen in the works of the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Although they were not in complete agreement with Smith, sacrifice and totemism remained primary concerns in their search for the origin of religion. For Frazer, the search led to magic, a stage preceding religion. Both Smith and Frazer led Durkheim to seek the origin of ritual and religion in totemism as exemplified in Australia. Durkheim believed that in totemism scholars would find the original form of ritual and the division of experience into the sacred and the profane. Ritual behaviour, they held, entails an attitude that is concerned with the sacred; and sacred acts and things, therefore, are nothing more than symbolic representations of society. In his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, Freud also remained convinced that the origin of religion and ritual is to be found in sacrifice.

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